Category: Guns

A worthwhile thing to remember. Don’t think just because your Congressman is a Republican, that he’s automatically going to be on your side. Only constituent pressure will keep him there. Here’s what we have going for us:

1. People are seemingly open to a discussion of the sorry state of mental health treatment.
2. The rest of the center-right coalition is not seemingly headed for the hills. Most generic folks in the coalition I follow on social media seem primed for a fight. We have more and stronger allies this time.

What we don’t have going for us? I think a lot depends on what President Obama does. He’s going to be facing a great deal of pressure from his own party to do something. There are some factors at play. One is we’re in the middle of “fiscal cliff” negotiations. Obama may not want to pick a fight with the GOP on the gun issue in the middle of delicate negotiations on this topic. The other side of the coin is he might revel in trying to pile on with the GOP. Knowing Obama’s personality, I think the latter is quite likely. He’s been trying very hard to get the GOP to throw the anti-tax constituency under the bus by having on tax hikes. He could also think it wise to try for a twofer, and get them to throw the gun vote under the bus at the same time.  The White House strategy in all this seems to be to make the GOP thoroughly screwed no matter what door they decided to walk through. The risk is that it would only cause the GOP to dig in their heels and not budge at all, being attacked on multiple fronts. But I’m not sure Obama thinks that is a bad result either, because then he gets to blame the GOP when we go off the “cliff.”

Time will tell, but one of the reasons you see the gun control folks pushing Obama so hard is because the “bully pulpit” is important. Clinton was a master of its use, even for causes that hurt Democrats, like gun control. The presidency is a powerful office for trying to steer the public conversation. If President Obama still had to protect a large number of blue dog Democrats, the political calculus would be different, but given that blue dogs are now an endangered species, it would be hard to believe that the Administration’s reaction is going to be to do nothing.

A few people seem to be offended that I’m not jumping right into the fight, in regards to a previous post I have done suggesting that going around advocating we arm teachers isn’t really going to win any hearts and minds, especially in the immediate aftermath of a horrific event like this. While we have made a lot of advances in the culture in regards to our issue, we have not yet made quite enough progress that such a thing can be seriously proposed. Diving right into the fight does not feel instinctively right to me, nor does it seem like wise strategy.

Why do I think this? How many states have successfully passed laws easing restrictions on permit carriers in Universities? In the wake of Virginia tech, this was tried, in several states, and we got our asses handed to us in notorious anti-gun legislatures such as Texas and Virginia, and a gubernatorial veto in Arizona by the same governor who signed the right-to-carry without a permit. We’re talking here about schools full of adults, and we can’t get it done. Removing gun free school zones for primary and secondary schools is up there with legalizing machine guns in terms of “culture just isn’t there yet” issues.

When I speak of now not being the time for politics, that’s not a capitulation. It not only makes us look decent, it’s a smart strategy. The big issue you have in the wake of a tragedy like this is that the “something must be done” crowd is going to demand that, well, something be done. Remember that in the wake of Virginia Tech, the gun control organizations were shouting from the rooftops and pushing their whole agenda, but before the (then Democratic) Congress could really get any momentum on it, the “Something must be done” crowd was appeased by what, on balance, was able to be made into a pro-gun bill. That bill  encouraged states to report more mental health adjudications to NICS (which most of them haven’t lifted a finger to do for various reasons, including state privacy laws) in exchange for turning mental health prohibitions on gun ownership from lifetime prohibitions to prohibitions one could petition to have lifted. I can promise you that the Bradys were less than happy with that bill, but they had no choice but to get behind it. It offered Congress a way to please the “Something must be done!” crowd, and go back to their shocked and horrified constituents and tell them what a wonderful thing they did. A lot of people were upset with NRA for floating that bill, but it staved off the possibility we were going to get something far worse as a result of Virginia Tech. In my opinion, it was a brilliant maneuver on NRA’s part to keep the bad bills from moving in a Democratic Congress whose leadership was hostile to civilian gun ownership.

So what is going to be the issue to hit the “Something must be done” crowd this time? I spent a lot of time looking through posts on social media, seeing what my family is saying, seeing what my former schoolmates are saying, childhood friends, coworkers, etc. Most of these folks are ordinary people, and not activists or bloggers, or political junkies. There are some talking about gun control, but I don’t see people shouting from the rooftops. The vast majority are just shocked, horrified, and upset. If you hit them with “Arm teachers!” you’re going to turn them off. They’ll stop listening to you. But one message is definitely out there, and that’s the colossal failure that is our current mental health system. If you want people not thinking gun control is the solution, that’s the policy point to make. I know a lot of libertarians are uncomfortable with this, but it’s going to come down to a choice: either we hospitalize the most seriously mentally ill, or we turn the rest of the country into a low level padded cell where no one can have dangerous or sharp objects. The vast majority of the population who are not libertarian will likely force this choice.

Plus, fixing the mental health system, unlike gun control, has a prayer of actually making a difference. This guy committed his horrific act in Brady #5 ranked state Connecticut. Connecticut requires a permit to purchase a handgun and has a statewide assault weapons ban. Connecticut also has a safe storage law. I also heard that the shooter tried to buy a gun and was denied by NICS. Neither of these laws stopped the shooter, because he murdered his mother and stole her guns. Many of us responsibly keep our guns under lock and key, but if someone murders us and gets the key, there’s no gun control law in the universe that’s going to prevent those guns from falling into the wrong hands. If lunatics are going to keep getting a hold of guns, and as long as lunatics roam the streets, they will, we have to have solutions, and win over the public, most of whom think “something must be done!” from those who will propose more gun control as the solution. In this vein, I think every gun owner needs to read Clayton’s book, My Brother Ron. We do not live in a world where people are going to watch 20 kindergarteners brutally murdered, along with their teachers, and the response is going to be “C’est la vie.” Events like this, in one day, can erase years of cultural progress if we don’t play our cards well.

The problem is, once they start smelling blood in the water, the sharks come out. For people who live in Colorado what are you going to do about it? Because sitting back and believing someone else will step up is going to result in this coming to pass:

Hickenlooper said the issues that merit discussion include “things like, do we all need assault weapons?” which he said are “designed for warfare” and “designed to pierce bulletproof vests and body armor.”

You’re going to get an assault weapons ban if people don’t step up.

Thanks to Tam (who suggests we’re all probably not paranoid enough) for this and this stories on how Uncle Sam is crushing our privacy and protections from searches. Let me tell you, I’m so glad we don’t have that civil liberty stomping Bush in the White House anymore, and replaced him with a thorough progressive Democrat who will protect our civil liberties.

Often times when I talk about self-hosting, people wonder why I would do such a thing, given that hosting providers are cheap, and doing it myself is more complicated. This is a big part of the reason why. What happened to Wyatt is another big part of the reason why. I control the horizontal and the vertical (even if the signal is still vulnerable, it makes it harder for them, at least), and if someone wants access to the e-mail on our servers, they have to hand a subpoena to either Jason or me personally. Plus, given that we have redundancy on the signal, if someone decided to cut my line, I can be up and running somewhere else within hours, since my data is not at the mercy of some IT drone at an ISP.